Wednesday, June 14, 2017

I watched a PBS special that was
potentially one of the most promising and compelling programs on television,
only it got turned into a hideous mishmash that almost totally wrecked the
historical value of the material. It was shown on the occasion of the 100th
anniversary of the birth of President John F. Kennedy, and the main focus was
the recently rediscovered footage of the fabled inaugural gala hosted by Frank
Sinatra at the National Guard Armory in Washington, D.C. January 19, 1961, the
day before Kennedy’s inauguration as President. Sinatra had been a key part in
Kennedy’s campaign and had rounded up an impressive list of celebrities not
only to come out for him publicly but, after he was elected, to participate in
the gala: Ella Fitzgerald, Milton Berle, Alan King, Joey Bishop, Ethel Merman
(who came out to participate in the Kennedy gala and to wish him well even
though she was a lifelong Republican — today our country is so polarized it’s
virtually impossible to imagine a performer crossing party lines to honor a new
President with different politics from their own!), Nat “King” Cole, Gene
Kelly, Harry Belafonte, Jimmy Durante and opera star Helen Traubel. Sinatra was
particularly proud that he had got Fitzgerald, Belafonte and Cole on the
program because he was hoping that the presence of African-Americans on the
talent list at the gala would not only publicly dramatize Kennedy’s commitment
to civil rights but would “push” the administration to be more active on race
issues than Kennedy had promised in the campaign. (The fact that Kennedy put in
a call to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s wife Coretta while King was famously
languishing in that Birmingham jail, while his opponent, Richard Nixon, thought
doing that would be showboating and ignored it, was a highly symbolic gesture
that helped signal the historic switch in the two major parties’ positions on
civil rights through the rest of the 1960’s; the Democrats, historically the
party of slavery, segregation and the Ku Klux Klan, became the party of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, while the “Party of
Lincoln” became, thanks to the deal Richard Nixon cut with South Carolina
Senator Strom Thurmond to institute the “Southern Strategy” to neutralize the
third-party threat of George Wallace in 1968, the party of racism and white
supremacy.)

Apparently the entire inaugural gala was filmed by NBC for an
all-star TV special, but for some reason it never aired; the commentary on this
program said this was because Washington, D.C. was gripped by one of the worst
snowstorms in its history, though even in 1961 that shouldn’t have prevented a broadcast — even if they couldn’t
do it live, they could still have shown the film later. The footage was
rediscovered, and of course the obvious way to present it would have been to
shoot a short documentary prologue about the 1960 Kennedy campaign and the
involvement of Sinatra and his celebrity friends in it, use that to preface the
gala footage and show the extant footage of the gala, start to finish. Did they
do that? No-o-o-o-o-o! Instead they
decided to use the gala footage simply as raw material, dragging in talking
heads like historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and actress Phylicia Rashad (who
seems to have been dragged in just because she’s Black and she could give props
to Kennedy and Sinatra for having so many Black performers on the show),
sometimes having them talk over the performances, and so frequently cutting away from the actual gala to
show video footage or still photos of the Kennedys that after a while it
started to seem like they were just using the soundtrack of the gala as basis
of a series of music videos of Kennedy, his family and his Presidency. The
gala, what you could see of it, looked quite impressive despite the horrible
circumstances under which it was being performed: a hall way too big for the kind of intimate entertainment being
provided (though decades later Sinatra would perform in similarly huge venues
to accommodate the thousands of people who wanted to see him live before he
croaked), a snowstorm that literally
stranded Ethel Merman inside the Armory (she had shown up to rehearse,
intending to go back to her hotel, pick up her stage costume and wear it during
the actual performance; instead she couldn’t leave, so she sang in the plain
plaid overcoat she’d worn to the rehearsal), and a “ceremonial” audience that
nonetheless seemed to appreciate what they were being given.

The gala — or at
least the bits and pieces we got of it during the PBS show — opened with
Sinatra singing “You Make Me Feel So Young” in the beautiful arrangement Nelson
Riddle had given him for the Songs for Swinging Lovers LP in 1956 (and the recording quality was surprisingly
good for a concert film in 1961; the charming background parts Riddle wrote for
a flute section were quite audible), a song that seemed on that occasion to
conjure up the youthful effervescence that had attracted millions of voters to
pick the young, glamorous Kennedy over the more experienced but also more dour
Nixon. Ella Fitzgerald was up next, doing a version of “Give Me the Simple
Life” that continued the exuberant mood — I’ve long thought Ella was at her
best singing in slow or medium tempi and using her magnificent musicianship and
phrasing to put a song over, and this one was a little too bouncy to show her
at her best, but she was still great and the song fit the upbeat mood of the
overall show. Then there was a series of comedy routines involving Milton
Berle, Joey Bishop (the only Rat Packer besides Sinatra himself who was part of
the gala), Alan King and Bill Dana (doing his stereotypically racist but still
screamingly funny “Astronaut José Jimenez” routine), after which Ethel Merman
came on in her rehearsal coat and belted out her big hit “Everything’s Coming
Up Roses” from the musical Gypsy. I’ve
never been a fan of La Merman — I can
tell those loud, belted high notes must have had a visceral effect on her audiences
but I don’t like the way they only rarely approached pitch (I remember when I
got the CD compilation From Gershwin’s Time on Columbia in 1997, celebrating Gershwin’s centennial,
and Merman’s star-making song, “I Got Rhythm,” was performed on that set by
Kate Smith, whose voice was just as big as Merman’s and whose musicianship,
especially her intonation, was far superior) — but on this occasion Merman was
better behaved musically than usual and the whole theme of the song, with its
notes of indomitability and ultimate triumph, couldn’t have been more
appropriate for the inauguration of a new young President. After that the PBS
producers plugged in an earlier recording from the 1960 campaign singing “High
Hopes,” the song James Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn had written for Sinatra’s 1959
musical A Hole in the Head and which
Cahn rewrote as a JFK campaign theme song (“Back Jack/Jack is on the right
track”).

This went into one of the most bizarre parts of the gala, in which
Sinatra, Berle, Kelly, Fitzgerald and Cole teamed up for a medley of songs with
special lyrics telling the story of the 1960 campaign. It began with a rehash
of the famous “Gallagher and Shean” vaudeville routine, after which Alan King
sang, and Gene Kelly danced to, “It’s Been a Long, Long Time.” Then Nat “King”
Cole warbled a bit of his 1951 hit “Too Young” to make fun of the frequent
criticism during the campaign that Kennedy was too young to be President
(though Nixon was only five years older!). After that Berle went into a number,
based on Gay New Orleans pianist Tony Jackson’s turn-of-the-last-century
classic “Pretty Baby,” which purported to explain the Electoral College. (In
1960 we were still in the middle of that long and remarkable run of 26
Presidential elections in 104 years, from 1892 to 1996, in which the winner of
the popular vote for President also won the Electoral College, and hence the
Presidency. Since 2000 that’s happened only three times out of five!) After
that Harry Belafonte came out to sing the 1920’s song “My Buddy” with a
rewritten lyric, “My Bobby,” paying tribute to the new President’s brother
Robert and the importance of their political relationship. Then there was an
ensemble version of the old college fight song “On Wisconsin,” about the
importance of the Wisconsin primary to Kennedy’s eventual win of the Democratic
nomination, followed by Sinatra doing a campaign rewrite of the song “That Old
Black Magic” as “That Old Jack Magic.”
Ella Fitzgerald then came on for the song “Too Close for Comfort” — a reference
to the razor-thin margin by which Kennedy won the 1960 election — and the
medley closed with the ensemble singing yet another rewritten lyric to “High Hopes,” “Moving Forward.” After
that things reverted to more traditional showbiz as Nat “King” Cole came out
and did his jazzy version of the song “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top” from
Richard Rodgers’ and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Oklahoma!, and Gene Kelly came on for an elaborate dance routine
which began with a bit of “Singin’ in the Rain,” segued into an Irish jig
commemorating the shared Irish-American ancestry of both Kelly and Kennedy, and
ended with a batch of patriotic songs during whose final entry, John Philip
Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever,” Kelly ended up break-dancing.

Then
Belafonte sang “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and after that came the high
point of the evening: Frank Sinatra singing Earl Robinson’s anthem to
patriotism and tolerance, “The House I Live In.” Frank Sinatra had introduced
this song in a 1945 short film, also called The House I Live In, directed by Mervyn LeRoy and written by future Hollywood
10 blacklistee Albert Maltz, in which he’s taking a break from a recording
session, he runs into a group of kids who are targeting one of their number for
a beating because “he’s a different religion.” Sinatra delivers a lecture on
racial and religious tolerance in the weird combination of profundity and corn
that was the stock in trade of Leftist writers during the Popular Front era,
and then he sings the title song — only in neither his rendition in the film
nor the record he made at the time for Columbia did he sing the song with
anything like the sheer emotion and soul he brought to it at the Kennedy gala,
flush with the hope that the President he had just helped to elect might, not
only as a liberal Northern Democrat but an Irish Catholic whose forebears had
suffered discrimination themselves, actually do something to bring about
equality. (Sinatra would keep “The House I Live In” in his live act for
decades, but as his politics lurched Rightward and he ended up supporting
Ronald Reagan the song would sound more like an empty gesture, just one more of
his old hits he had to slog through to keep his audiences happy.) After “The
House I Live In” — which the producers of this PBS presentation at least
allowed us to see and hear most of
straight through — Nat “King” Cole did his hit version of Hoagy Carmichael’s
“Stardust,” though the PBS producers defaced it with stock footage of
Kennedy-era rocket launches and a sound clip of JFK’s voice saying we were
going to the moon and addressing the nation’s other challenges “not because
they are easy, but because they are hard” — obviously somebody at PBS thought
“Stardust” should be presented as a metaphor for the space program.

Then Kennedy
himself emerged to deliver the sort of short greeting the honoree at these
sorts of events usually contributes, after which the program closed with Jimmy
Durante, of all people, singing the Kurt Weill-Maxwell Anderson “September
Song” (an odd bit of nostalgia — the singer is supposed to be an old man
reminiscing about his love life and hoping he can have one last fling with a
member of the opposite sex before he croaks — for a gala honoring the
inauguration of the second-youngest President in American history), and a
closing with Helen Traubel belting out “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Despite the wretched hash PBS made of it in their presentation — may we dare
hope for a straightforward presentation of the gala, start to finish, on DVD or
Blu-Ray? — the gala is fascinating not only musically but politically.
Musically the biggest surprise to a modern-day audience is that there’s no rock
’n’ roll — in 2017 it seems like an odd omission for a tribute to a President
that exuded youth and had won at least in part to the youth vote, but Frank
Sinatra personally couldn’t stand rock and people of his (and Kennedy’s)
generation wouldn’t have regarded it as a legitimate feature of something so
serious and Important as honoring a newly elected President. Politically what’s
most surprising about this is that at a time like today when we’re constantly
being told what government can’t do —
including providing health care to all its citizens — and when the current
President is not only the oldest person
to be elected to that office (as Kennedy was the youngest — though Theodore
Roosevelt was even younger when he assumed the presidency following the
assassination of William McKinley) but his entire approach is to warn the
country of dire dangers that he alone can fix, it’s wrenching to be taken back
to a time when a young, exciting, dynamic, handsome President told us what we could do and beckoned us to join him on a “New Frontier.” (The
cultural gap between John F. Kennedy and Donald J. Trump is weirdly symbolized
by the difference between the alacrity with which the stars of 1961 accepted
the invitation to be part of his inaugural gala and the difficulty Trump’s
people had getting anybody to perform
at his in 2017.)

Kennedy’s legacy has become one of the oddest in American
politics, not only because he died way
too soon but because he achieved relatively little, and yet that little allowed
people who came after him to claim his legacy for their own and say, “If only …
” More sober-minded historians could argue that ironically it was Kennedy’s
assassination that allowed for the passage of the Civil Rights Act and much of
what he had proposed — if only because Kennedy proved wretchedly incompetent at
getting Congress to approve all those things, while the man Kennedy’s death elevated
to the Presidency, Lyndon Johnson, was a master at dealing with Congress — but Kennedy basically became a
palimpsest on which just about everyone in the Democratic Party could write
their own desires, their own priorities, their own positions (and Kennedy’s
brother Robert became even more of a palimpsest when he was struck down by an assassin’s bullet 4 ½ years later in
the midst of a run for the Presidency that was probably doomed to failure,
though that hasn’t stopped generations of liberals and progressives since from
thinking, “If only RFK had lived … ”). The production with which PBS surrounded
the footage of the Kennedy inaugural gala essentially reflects the “white”
Kennedy legend — quite a lot of which was built on lies: the seemingly vigorous
young man who was in fact chronically ill; the guy with the glamorous wife who
behind the scenes couldn’t keep from sticking his dick into anything as long as it was alive, human and female; the politician
who promised heroic achievements and delivered almost nothing. And yet the
Kennedy ideal has so hypnotized
America, and especially liberal and progressive America, that just about every
Democrat who’s run for President since, most notably Bill Clinton and Barack
Obama, has had at least to try to claim
some part of it for themselves (which is one reason why it was such a
horrendous, stupid mistake for the Democrats to nominate Hillary Clinton in
2016 — though Trump mobilized his base through resentment and fear, not hope
and positive change, at least he was
the breath of fresh air, while Clinton presented herself as the voice of
“experience” and attacked her opponent as “not ready,” basically making the
same losing argument against Trump that Nixon had against JFK in 1960) — which
led comedian Mort Sahl, a personal friend of JFK, to say that Democratic voters
were like people who got married and then
tried to fall in love.

The commentators on the PBS presentation of the Kennedy
gala made the obvious point that JFK’s administration “ended badly,” and it wasn’t
just the murder of its central figure that qualified as an unhappy ending:
after working his ass off to elect John Kennedy President, Frank Sinatra had a
hissy-fit when the Kennedys abruptly dumped him in 1962. Kennedy had been
planning a vacation in Palm Springs and Sinatra offered to put him up, setting
up quarters on his estate for the Secret Service agents who would be providing
security and building a helipad on his property for JFK’s helicopter to land.
Then Kennedy, warned off by his brother Robert — who at the time was using his
powers as U.S. Attorney General to bring down the Mafia and was all too aware
of Sinatra’s Mob ties — abruptly canceled his plans to stay with Sinatra and
spent his California vacation at the home of lifelong Republican Bing Crosby
instead. Sinatra never forgave Robert
Kennedy for that one, and it was that which led Sinatra to endorse Hubert
Humphrey for President in 1968 and thereafter switch parties and support Nixon
and Reagan. One sees the great entertainers on these film clips and realizes
with a start that Harry Belafonte is the only one who’s still alive — just as,
of all the speakers at the 1963 March on Washington, Congressmember John Lewis
(D-Georgia) is the only one who’s still alive (though quite a few of the musical
guests on the program, notably Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, are not only alive but
still active) — which gives one a sense not only of the inevitable march of
time but also that the idealistic torch which JFK in his inaugural said had
been passed to a new generation of Americans has since been dropped, and not
very many people in this country — certainly not the ones leading it today! —
seem all that interested in picking it up again.